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Douthat on the Ayers Strategy

Then the subject turns to the Presidential race - and if the news channel behaves the way the McCain campaign clearly hopes it will, the first thing you'll see is a short feature on how John McCain has cut a new anti-Obama ad featuring Ayers, Ayers and more Ayers. It's possible that this inspires you to think: Man, that terrorist-sympathizing Obama can't be trusted in an economic crisis. In that case, Steve Schmidt, Andy McCarthy and sundry others are political masterminds, and I am a plain fool.

But I don't think I'm a fool. I think McCain looks, to our hypothetical undecided, utterly disconnected from what's happening in the world, and the details of the Ayers connection, however troubling they might be in another context, blur away into a broader impression of a flailing, desperate, out-of-touch candidate. At this point, the McCain camp seems to be taking its cues more from the liberal caricature of past conservative campaigns - that they've all been fundamentally unserious exercises in culture-war button-pushing - than from the campaigns themselves. It's as though they're being paid under the table by Thomas Frank to goose his book sales and vindicate his thesis.

As I've stated in another of the comment threads on this theme, that I've arrived at the same analysis of the situation as the co-author of a recent book that could be described as 'applied neoconservatism for the Twenty-First century is indicative of the disarray of conservatism: the battlefield is a rout, and, in the melee, people who might otherwise disagree with respect to substantive proposals at least discover, in their flight, that they agree on the causes of the rout. Republican stewardship of the American economy, which has accelerated the globalization producing such traumatic dislocations for middle-class Americans, has by that very consequence lent some measure of credibility to left-wing canards; it is as if, at a time when middle-class incomes have stagnated - which they have, during the Bush years - the Republican party, via its economic policies, sought to prove the truth of those left-wing canards. Douthat's book, Grand New Party, is an attempt to redress this failing of the GOP's public philosophy. Now, as if to compound this disconnect from the circumstances of the very voters the GOP requires if it is to succeed, the Republican presidential candidate pursues a campaign strategy which seems calculate to validate left-wing assertions of ritualistic bad faith.

Comments (5)

The Obama panic is on, a global crisis of confidence which is gripped in fear of a leftist takeover of the command-in-chief of the US armed forces and more. Money is talking not about the immediate past but of the possibly imminent Obama future, which could be a world like Venezuela under Chavez. Incidentally why aren't the religious, who are familiar with theology, not giving many thousands of sermons on Jeremiah Wright and Cone's BLT, as not Christian?

As bizarre as it may seem to the average conservative American, the Europeans actually relish the prospect of an Obama presidency, and, quite possibly wrongly, regard this prospect as a harbinger of stability after the Dark Ages of Bush.

Perhaps the problem isn't the Republican party; perhaps it's the type of conservative who seeks political power. After all, if government is the problem, why seek office unless all you want is power and riches?

Now that the stock market is on a really huge upswing, this causes a thought that Obama, who had been fear-mongering so much, might have been tuenned from being something like an Iranian agent, to a cooperator, in implicating others. such as perhaps Ayers.

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